PSYCOPATHIC POLITICIANS

On Inauguration Day, the world will witness a grand victory not only for the popular game show host, his entourage, and the interests of big business. This unique moment will also represent a historical triumph for a particular combination of human values, traits, and behaviors that has proven extremely successful at social domination for millennia, but has never quite had a political and cultural moment like this. As we begin 2017, the psychopathic personality writ large has conquered American society, and many are cheering.

In my psychological research on criminalpsychopathy, I’ve written about the history and implications of this personality type. There’s an abundant empirical literature demonstrating that psychopathy is characterized by a constellation of emotional, interpersonal, and behavioral traits that include grandiosity, impulsivity, superficial charm, pathological lying, a lack of guilt or remorse, and callous, forceful, exploitative, often violent interpersonal behaviors. While the concept is only a couple of centuries old, scratch the surface of cultural histories and you’ll find that psychopaths have been wreaking havoc across human societies for thousands of years.